[Peace] News notes for May 5, 2002 [part 2 of 2]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

FRIDAY, MAY 03, 2002

A VICTORY, I THINK. Sportswear giant Nike Inc. can be sued for false
advertising over a publicity campaign that sought to dispel reports that
Asian sweatshops are used to produce its famous footwear, California's
Supreme Court ruled. In a split decision, California's top court found
that Nike's efforts to defend its Asian business practices were in essence
commercial, and thus not subject to the free speech protections guaranteed
by the U.S. Constitution. "Our holding ... in no way prohibits any
business enterprise from speaking out on issues of public importance or
from vigorously defending its own labor practices," the court said in its
4-3 majority decision. "It means only that when a business enterprise, to
promote and defend its sales and profits, makes factual representations
about its own products or its own operations, it must speak truthfully."  
... The lawsuit was among a number of high-profile attacks on Nike over
conditions at Asian factories where workers, mostly women aged 18 to 24,
are subcontracted to produce most of its shoes. The California suit said
Nike knew that these workers were subjected to physical punishment and
sexual abuse, endured dangerous working conditions, and were often unable
to earn a "living wage" despite workdays that could be 14 hours long. It
charged Nike with violating California laws barring false advertising by
deliberately obscuring these facts, alleging that the Beaverton,
Oregon-based company mounted an aggressive advertising and public
relations campaign portraying itself as a "model of corporate
responsibility" in an effort to boost sales of its products. [REUTERS]

AND A DEFEAT. Otto Reich has been named to the Board of Visitors at the
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as
the School of the Americas. WHISC's charter requires a board of visitors
to monitor the school, to ensure that the curriculum emphasize 'human
rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military,
and the role of the military in a democratic society.' Reich has a history
of aiding coups and known terrorists. Reich first gained notoriety
throughout Latin America and among US human rights groups for his role as
head of the Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan administration.
This office launched an anti-Sandinista propaganda campaign, illegally
designed to influence the American public to embrace the administration¹s
agenda for Central America. Later, as US ambassador to Venezuela, Reich
used his office to help Orlando Bosch get into the US. Bosch was convicted
of firing a bazooka at a freighter in Miami, and accused of bombing a
Cuban jet, killing 73 people. Despite this record the current Bush
administration nominated Reich for Assistant Secretary of State for
Western Hemisphere Affairs. In this capacity Reich admittedly advised
Pedro Carmona‹the businessman who seized the presidency‹during the failed
coup in Venezuela last month. Also he met with generals who planned the
coup in the months leading up to the coup (some of whom were trained at
the SOA). [PROREV]

HOW ARE CHIEF THINKERS CHIEFLY THINK. A remarkably candid essay -- "The
Future of War and the American Military," in the May/June issue of Harvard
Magazine, openly calls on the U.S. to plan for "imperial wars." Written by
Stephen Peter Rosen, a former NSC and Defense Department staffer who now
has an endowed full professorship, the article says, among other things:
"It can be difficult for the United States to see itself accurately and to
state its goals objectively. Let us start with some basics. The United
States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around the world. Our
military spending exceeds that of the next six or seven powers combined,
and we have a monopoly on many advanced and not so advanced military
technologies. We, and only we, form and lead military coalitions into war.
We use our military dominance to intervene in the internal affairs of
other countries.... " [PROREV]
 
SATURDAY, MAY 04, 2002 [KENT STATE]

IN THE NAME OF THE WOT (II).  About 50 Israeli tanks raided the West Bank
city of Nablus, and three people - one Israeli officer and two
Palestinians - were killed.  [THESE THINGS HAVE GONE ON ALL WEEK -- I
HAVEN'T INCLUDED THEM.]

WHAT THE WOT IS SUPPOSED TO DISTRACT YOU FROM. The Labor Department
reports that unemployment has reached 6%, the highest since 1994.  [THE
NYT HAS A WONDERFUL UPSIDE-DOWN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN AWAY THE INCREASINGLY
BAD EMPLOYMENT SITUATION FOR 80% OF AMERICANS: "The government's extension
of unemployment benefits in March has caused the number of people looking
for a job to increase since they must be on the job market to qualify for
the benefits. Only people looking for work count as unemployed."]

SUNDAY, MAY 05, 2002

WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO TELL US? "George Bush, who is pulling between 75
and 81% in the polls, is being hailed by the media as an immensely popular
figure. Opposition, which runs about 20%, is generally considered too
insignificant to report since, according to Cokie Roberts, it doesn't
include anyone who counts. Meanwhile, France, where Jacques Chirac is
pulling between 75 and 82% in the polls, is considered in mortal danger
because of the candidacy of rightwing Jean-Marie Le Pen who is pulling
between 18 and 25% of the vote. His candidacy is being widely and grimly
reported." [SAM SMITH]

HO HUM. In today's French presidential elections, more voters went to the
polls than in the first round. The first round had a 30% abstention rate,
the second less than 20%. The Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere was the only one
from those parties and candidates of the left in the first round that did
not support Chirac.  LO's call for a blank vote was followed by
1.3-Million voters. Neo-fascist Le Pen (Front Nationale) vote collapsed
from 4.8-Million in the first round (when there were 16 candidates) to
3.9-Million in the second round with only two candidates and more than
2.5-Million additional voters. Chirac would use the support for him from
the mainstream left (Socialist and Communist Party) and of the Marxist
left Ligue Communiste Revolutionarie to put forward the motion for a right
wing, conservative "popular Front" or "Republican Front" for the upcoming
legislative elections in June. Chirac belongs to the right wing Gaullist
sector of the French ruling class. In the past, he mirrored and coopted
many of the planks of the neo-fascist FN.  

PROJECTED RESULTS OF FRANCE'S SECOND ROUND: 
	Registered voters: 27 372 485 
	Abstentions: 5 107 335 (18,66 %)  
	Voters: 22 265 150 (81,34 %)  
	Blank and Spoiled ballots: 1 311 817 (4,79 %) - estimate 
	Jacques Chirac: 17 064 915 (76,6%) - estimate 
	Jean-Marie Le Pen: 3 888 418 (17.4%) - estimate

	* * *

	SHARON AND ARAFAT HAVE NOTHING MEANINGFUL TO OFFER EACH OTHER
	--ROBERT FISK 

Self-delusion has crossed the Atlantic. George Bush is having visions
again - just as he did before the most recent bloodbath in Israel and
Palestine - and Colin Powell, whose latest Middle East mission was a
wholesale disaster, wants to devise "a set of principles" for an
Arab-Israeli peace. And, as usual, it is the occupied, not the occupier,
who is warned this is the "last chance" for peace. That the United States
wants to enlist the Europeans, Russia and the UN in its plans for a Middle
East peace conference is perhaps the only sign of realism in the
initiative. Otherwise, it's the same old twaddle. Yasser Arafat has to
earn "trust" - this from the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer - and
will not, for the moment, receive any invitations to the White House. He
has to curb "terror". But Ariel Sharon, whose army was accused of war
crimes in Jenin by Human Rights Watch yesterday, will be joshing with Mr
Bush in Washington next week. It was impossible, in Jerusalem yesterday,
to take any of this seriously. Mr Arafat had just emerged from his
Ramallah headquarters to call the Israelis "Nazis" while Mr Sharon, only
two days earlier, had announced that Netzarim, the illegal Jewish
settlement in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, was the same as Tel Aviv. Since
Mr Sharon came to power, no fewer than 34 new settlements or outposts for
Jews, and Jews only, on Arab land, have been constructed. A glance at the
events of the past 24 hours shows just how far the Bush administration has
strayed from reality. For days, the US President demanded that Israel
withdraw its troops from West Bank cities. Mr Sharon simply ignored him.
"When I say withdraw, I mean it," Mr Bush snapped at one point. Mr Sharon
ignored him. Yesterday, as Mr Powell warned Mr Arafat that it was his
"last chance" to show his leadership, the Israeli Prime Minister was
sending an armoured column to re-invade the Palestinian city of Nablus for
the second time in two weeks. There was to be no "last chance" for Mr
Sharon; only for the iniquitous Mr Arafat. And what on earth, one
wondered, was the point in parading the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan,
alongside Mr Powell on Thursday night? The UN Security Council resolution
calling for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian Authority areas of the
West Bank - supported by the United States - is still being flagrantly
ignored by Israel. Only a day earlier, Mr Annan was forced, in utter
humiliation, to disband his fact-finding mission to Jenin after Israel
refused to accept it. So what was his presence supposed to mean? The
impotent secretary general just stood next to the equally impotent US
Secretary of State. The squalid, corrupt little dictator of Ramallah, Mr
Arafat, and the brutal, merciless leader of the Middle East's mightiest
army, Mr Sharon, have nothing to offer each other. Mr Arafat cannot fulfil
his required role of colonial governor - to "control his own people" -
while Mr Sharon cannot fulfil his promise to provide Israelis with
security. As one of his legal advisers admitted hours after Washington's
call for a peace conference, the diminution in Palestinian violence "won't
last for ever". Never, since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, have Israelis
and Palestinians been so far apart. So what possible inducements can
Washington extend to either side? If Mr Arafat wants an end to occupation
and to settlements on Palestinian land, and a capital in east Jerusalem,
Mr Sharon will not oblige. If Mr Sharon wants to go on building
settlements and maintaining the occupation and claiming all of Jerusalem
as the "eternal and unified capital of Israel", Mr Arafat will not oblige.
Meanwhile, the Americans blissfully hope that Mr Bush's "visions" - of
Israeli and Palestinian states happily co-existing side by side - will
survive the next two months. How is this possible? It is only a matter of
time before the next vicious Palestinian suicide bomber blows up himself
or herself in an Israeli city. And thus only a matter of time before
Israel smashes its way into West Bank cities all over again. In fact,
Israel doesn't need an excuse to do this any more. Yesterday's thrust into
Nablus was another precedent. Far from being a retaliation, Israel did not
invade Palestinian territory in response to Palestinian attacks. It said
it had entered Nablus to prevent "future" attacks. Needless to say, the
nature of this precedent went unreported. So we are back to the "last
chance". But "last chance" for what? If Mr Arafat does not earn that
all-purpose American "trust", what is supposed to happen? Is he to be
liquidated? Will the Americans choose another Palestinian leader? Or will
they just let the Israelis build more settlements (something the Israelis
are doing anyway) and abandon the "visions" and walk away from the
Palestinians, leaving them to the mercy of Mr Sharon and his dreams of a
Greater Israel?


	MIDDLE EAST TERRORISM: MADE IN USA
	--Carl Estabrook <cge at shout.net>

	--"In the last days of his administration, Clinton and Israeli
	Prime Minister Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian State,
	but the greedy Palestinians preferred terrorism."--

Widely believed, that is probably the most prominent lie in current
American and Israeli propaganda about the Middle East. In the most
murderous theater of the Bush administration's world-wide "War on
Terrorism," Israel, America's principal client state, continues to
terrorize a suppressed and brutalized population of Palestinians with a
military occupation that has been armed and financed by the US for more
than a generation. The current, murderous phase is justified to those who
are paying for it -- US taxpayers -- with the assertion that the Israeli
army is attacking refugee camps to "wipe out terrorism" -- terrorism that
is simply an irrational response to the "generous offer" by the US and
Israel.

Of course the offer was nothing of the sort. Clinton and Barak offered the
Palestinians a parody of a state, in five separate cantons in the Occupied
Territories and the Gaza strip, with the borders controlled by the Israeli
army. Israel would remain in control of a greatly expanded Jerusalem and
resources from the West Bank, as well as of the bulk of the Israeli
settlements established illegally in the Occupied territories.
Significantly, no maps of the "generous offer" were published at the time.

It has been pointed out that, if I steal your car, it's not a generous
offer for me to propose to allow you to use it on alternate weekends. The
United Nations long ago ordered Israel to withdraw from the Occupied
Territories (Security Council Resolution 242), which were seized in the
1967 war and since then have been under Israeli military control.

It's as if, at the time of the American Revolution, the British had
offered parts of Massachusetts, New York (but not New York City),
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia to the Americans, with the borders
of these areas patrolled by the British army and navy. The Clinton-Barak
proposal was just another version of what Euro-Americans did to Native
Americans in the 19th century -- confine them to reservations on the
poorest land. The proposal was not even as generous as what white South
Africans did under apartheid: there blacks were confined to
reservation-like "homelands" (Bantustans), but the racist government
supported them financially; no such idea seems to have occurred to the
Israelis. On the contrary, their recent rampage through the West Bank --
on the excuse of searching for terrorists -- resulted not only in many
killings but also in the destruction of the material infrastructure of any
possible Palestinian state.

The "Israeli-Palestinian problem" is presented by conventional academics
and pundits as a nearly insoluble, the result of "ancient hatreds,"
undoubtedly due to illiberal religious views. There is much head-shaking
over the "intractability" of the problem. But that's nonsense: it's no
more intractable than, say, the "German-French problem" of the early 1940s
or the "British-American problem" of the late 1770s. In each case, the
occupying power should withdraw its army.

Although the terminology of the time was a little different, the British
in America and the Germans in France complained loudly of the terrorism of
the American and French resistance, respectively, and used it as an excuse
for further military action and collective punishment. The Israelis are no
different. They should simply end their occupation as they were ordered to
do by the United Nations thirty-five years ago. Israeli settlements in the
Occupied Territories constitute war crimes under the Fourth Geneva
Convention and must be removed.

It does however seem to me that campaigns that call upon universities and
other institutions to remove investments from companies doing business
with Israel, may be wrong-headed. First of all, it's practically
impossible for such divestment to make a difference. Israel is by far the
largest recipient of US foreign aid -- its economy would collapse without
it. (Egypt, bought off in the Clinton administration as the major military
threat to Israel, is in a distant second place, and Turkey, in effective
alliance with Israel, is in third.) The billions that the US government
sends each year to Israel mean that corporate divestment could not have
the effect that it did on the economy of South Africa a generation ago.

Second and much more important is the fact that Israel could not carry on
its oppression without the permission as well as the financing of the US.
It is to get things a bit backward to address foreign governments in the
first place. As Americans, we should be calling upon our government to
stop supplying the F-16s, the helicopters, and the heavy weapons with
which the Israelis have attacked the people of the West Bank, who have
only small arms if any at all. And we should demand that the Bush
administration actually call off Israel's attacks, as it obviously could
do, rather than just seem to. Our complaints and cries of outrage should
be directed to our elected (and unelected) officials in Washington.

END